Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  First of all, I believe that a cooperative approach to international aid is absolutely necessary before anything else. Canada must not be all alone: all international players must be involved. If no comprehensive strategy provides us with the power to negotiate and put pressure o

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It will be possible if the international community agrees and combines its efforts. It is true that it will require a lot of human and material resources. However, the international community must develop a long-term overall strategy. In that way, it will really be possible to ch

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Amnesty International has not documented the sexual violence. With our usual research methods, we haven't documented any sexual violence committed by UN troops. I believe we saw the same report. We also heard about that in Haiti and elsewhere, where UN troops are sent. This isn't

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It happens mainly in North and South Kivu, where there are a lot of resources. And it's quite deplorable to see that the DRC has such a low level of development when it has such incredible resources. The many armed groups, such as the Mayi-Mayi and the former CNDP, which are in

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Here's what happened to the 80 representatives of the UN force. They were mainly Indians who had just arrived in the region and had not received any training, or very little, on how to protect civilians. In addition, they were apparently not made aware of what was going on. They

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm going to start by answering you in very broad terms. Denis Tougas will definitely be able to add to my answer and tell you about what goes on directly in the field. It varies a great deal. Sometimes the UN force in the field can take part in and facilitate the investigations

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm going to address that in a more comprehensive way, as I entirely agree with Denis Tougas about financial, economic and even physical accessibility, that is the act of travelling to the place where justice could eventually be rendered. There are obstacles throughout the proce

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  On the whole, there's no particular age. Young girls have been raped, but also grandmothers and very elderly individuals. There are no doubt other political objectives, but humiliation, the fact that it is done in front of children is the short-term goal of the widespread and col

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the Subcommittee on International Human Rights for inviting us and for inviting Amnesty International to speak to the violence against women in the DRC. I will try to cover three points in my short presentation. I will talk about

Status of Women committee  At the end of this report, there are notes, with all the references to government studies that have been conducted by the federal government. In addition, with respect to the national action plan, I believe that Manitoba is quite advanced. You must be aware of that. There's a ta

Status of Women committee  I wanted to give the honour of speaking to Ellen, but I believe she's preparing a good answer for you. We've been asking for this since 2004, and nothing has happened since that time. We have to start by sitting down together and having the desire to solve the problem of violenc

Status of Women committee  There absolutely has to be participation by provincial authorities. As I've often mentioned, discrimination in the case of many cultural and socio-economic issues depends on the provinces. We clearly need the cooperation of the various departments. Moreover, rapporteurs often ha

Status of Women committee  To provide a concrete response, as far as possible based on resources, in the very concrete aspects of the fight against violence in the community, I believe that there's one important aspect, and that is that the safe houses should be close to the women suffering the violence.

Status of Women committee  I believe that one of the ways of getting over the effects of the residential schools would be to stop perpetuating the phenomenon today. As I said earlier, three times as many children are being placed outside their communities and families today than there were at the peak time

Status of Women committee  With regard to the more general question of criminalization, what we noted in our research is that the take that police officers have on criminal aboriginal women who are in prostitution rings will often be immediately based on their so-called high-risk lifestyle. Often they'll